ii. Design Experiment

Design Experiments

These early experiments were to prescribe an aesthetic value to the sense of estrangement that emerges through the queering of technology. Kitbashing using found objects and machinery to queer concepts of the oikos—space, movement, home—futher augmented this estrangement. The contradiction in scale between the kitbashed objects and the meta-themes they investigated, and the redundancy of the original instrumentality of the kitbashed objects in the experiments assigned aesthetic qualities to the idea of technology as a shape-shifter.

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This contraption was the first experiment to defy normative ways of being. It was created by simulating the circumstances of the speculative reality of this thesis, where the CD player was “found” and was projectively read as a technology without an origin story. The act of taking it apart and queering the privileged rotational movement to create a cooking/ eating device is a shift in perception—technology is not read in terms of what it is and can do, but rather what it affords as a shape-shifter.